from the wheels-within-wheels dept

One of the central questions the Wikipedia community grapples with is: What exactly is Wikipedia trying to achieve? For example, does it aspire to be a total encyclopedia of everything? What is the appropriate level of detail?

As might be expected in a community made up of volunteers, feelings run high over these apparently dry questions of philosophy. Just as there are free software and open source factions that work together for a common cause, but eternally snipe at each other over details, so the Wikipedia community harbors two groups that agree to disagree on what is the proper scope for the project: the deletionists and the inclusionists. Here's what Wikipedia itself has to say on them:

"Deletionists" are proponents of selective coverage and removal of articles seen as unnecessary or highly substandard. Deletionist viewpoints are commonly motivated by a desire that Wikipedia be focused on and cover significant topics – along with the desire to place a firm cap upon proliferation of promotional use (seen as abuse of the website), trivia, and articles which are of no general interest, lack suitable source material for high quality coverage, or are too short or otherwise unacceptably poor in quality.

"Inclusionists" are proponents of broad retention, including retention of "harmless" articles and articles otherwise deemed substandard to allow for future improvement. Inclusionist viewpoints are commonly motivated by a desire to keep Wikipedia broad in coverage with a much lower entry barrier for topics covered – along with the belief in that it is impossible to tell what knowledge might be "useful" or productive, that content often starts poor and is improved if time is allowed, that there is effectively no incremental cost of coverage, that arbitrary lines in the sand are unhelpful and may prove divisive, and that goodwill requires avoiding arbitrary deletion of others' work. Some extend this to include allowing a wider range of sources such as notable blogs and other websites.

One particular area where the limits of inclusionism and deletionism are tested is local information. Should Wikipedia strive to provide the same level of detail about local information as it does about global facts? If so, how?

Monmouthpedia will be the first Wikipedia project to cover a whole town, creating articles on interesting and notable places, people, artifacts, flora, fauna and other things in Monmouth in as many languages as possible including Welsh.

We are very keen for local people to be involved in what ever way they would like. Computer skills are not that important, it’s the interest and the willingness to be involved, suggesting and writing articles, taking and donating photos and recommending good reference materials. If you speak another language it would be a great place to practice your writing skills and learn new vocabulary and grammar. There are a lot of opportunities for community involvement including teaching and learning of I.T skills, local history, natural history, languages and people of different ages working together.

The amount, detail and quality of the information we could create is amazing. The Council for British Archaeology has designated Monmouth as the 7th best town in Britain. Knowledge gives us context, it allows us to appreciate our surroundings more, Monmouth may be first place in the world to offer its tourist information in up to 270 languages.

Monmouthpedia will use QRpedia codes, a type of bar code a smartphone can read through its camera that takes you to a Wikipedia article in your language. QR codes are extremely useful, physical signs have no way of displaying the same amount of information and in a potentially huge number of languages.

Articles will have coordinates (geotags) to allow a virtual tour of the town using the Wikipedia layer on Google Streetview, Google Maps and will be available in augmented reality software including Layar.

There are a number of interesting facets to this project. The first is the direct involvement of local people. By limiting the range of the entries to one location it might prove easier to motivate new contributors – a perennial concern for the larger Wikipedia – and allow them to capture key aspects of a place they know well.

The use of QR codes in physical signage around the town will add a new directionality to the links between Monmouthpedia and the town it describes. Similarly, the geotags in the articles will allow text and images linked to geographical locations to be loaded automatically as people walk around with suitable apps on their smartphones. Obviously, once in place, that localized QR-coded infrastructure could also be exploited by other, quite different smartphone programs, to produce fascinating geo-informational mashups.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of Monmouthpedia is that it creates a kind of fractal Wikipedia. That's important because if it functions well, it sets a precedent for a new, nested kind of Wikipedia whose entries can sometimes drop down a level to an entirely new Wikipedia-like resource about a specific topic. Maybe the ultimate test of Monmouthpedia's success will be when people start creating wikis about those same "places, people, artifacts, flora, fauna and other things" that will soon fill its pages – an Inception-like Wikipedia within a Wikipedia within a Wikipedia.

Update: see this comment from a Wikipedian involved with the project for some clarifications.

from the is-this-what-we-really-want? dept

While SOPA supporters are running around pretending that the minor fixes that Lamar Smith has proposed have made the bill perfectly acceptable, lots of people who understand this stuff are still pointing out that the bill is a horrific abomination that will have serious negative consequences. We'd already mentioned that Wikipedia was considering a blackout to protest SOPA. Now, Wikimedia's General Counsel, Geoff Brigham, has written a thorough, detailed, and thoughtful explanation for why SOPA is still terrible. There's a lot more at the link, but a few points:

I’ve been asked for a legal opinion. And I will tell you, in my view, the new version of SOPA remains a serious threat to freedom of expression on the Internet.

The new version continues to undermine the DMCA and federal jurisprudence that have promoted the Internet as well as cooperation between copyright holders and service providers. In doing so, SOPA creates a regime where the first step is federal litigation to block an entire site wholesale: it is a far cry from a less costly legal notice under the DMCA protocol to selectively take down specified infringing material. The crime is the link, not the copyright violation. The cost is litigation, not a simple notice.

The expenses of such litigation could well force non-profit or low-budget sites, such as those in our free knowledge movement, to simply give up on contesting orders to remove their links. (Secs. 102(c)(3); 103(c)(2)) The international sites under attack may not have the resources to challenge extra-territorial judicial proceedings in the United States, even if the charges are false.

Although rendering it discretionary (Secs.102(c)(2)(A-E); 103(c)(2)(A-B)), the new bill would still allow for serious security risks to our communications and national infrastructure. The bill no longer mandates DNS blocking but still allows it as an option. As Sherwin Siy, deputy legal director of Public Knowledge, explained: “The amendment continues to encourage DNS blocking and filtering, which should be concerning for Internet security experts . . . .”

As I said, there's much more at the link, but this is pretty thorough and explains why SOPA, even in its changed form, is a huge threat and a bad idea -- especially if you believe in internet freedom.

from the who-needs-encyclopedias-anyway? dept

the Italian language Wikipedia may be no longer able to continue providing the service that over the years was useful to you, and that you expected to have right now. As things stand, the page you want still exists and is only hidden, but the risk is that soon we will be forced to actually delete it.

This action has been taken by the Italian Wikipedia editors to draw attention to an Italian bill that is being discussed by the Italian Parliament at the moment:

Today, unfortunately, the very pillars on which Wikipedia has been built - neutrality, freedom, and verifiability of its contents - are likely to be heavily compromised by paragraph 29 of a law proposal, also known as "DDL intercettazioni" (Wiretapping Act).

This proposal, which the Italian Parliament is currently debating, provides, among other things, a requirement to all websites to publish, within 48 hours of the request and without any comment, a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image.

Unfortunately, the law does not require an evaluation of the claim by an impartial third judge - the opinion of the person allegedly injured is all that is required, in order to impose such correction to any website.

Hence, anyone who feels offended by any content published on a blog, an online newspaper and, most likely, even on Wikipedia can directly request to publish a "corrected" version, aimed to contradict and disprove the allegedly harmful contents, regardless of the truthfulness of the information deemed as offensive, and its sources.

The Wikimedia Foundation stands with our volunteers in Italy who are challenging the recently drafted "DDL intercettazioni" (or Wiretapping Bill) bill in Italy. This bill would hinder the work of projects like Wikipedia: open, volunteer-driven, and collaborative spaces dedicated to sharing high-quality knowledge, not to mention the ability for all users of the internet to engage in democratic, free speech opportunities.

Wikipedians the world over pride themselves on their ability to rapidly remove false information from their project. Wikipedia has established methods to receive complaints or concerns from individuals or organizations and a strong system exists to remove incorrect or false information, and if necessary to remove complete articles in an effort to prevent vandalism. For Wikipedians, there is no value nor need for this proposed legislation.

The other issue raised on the mailing list discussion is to what extent the Italian law, if passed, would apply to Wikipedia, since it is not an Italian organization, and the servers are in the US and the Netherlands. Italian editors are nonetheless worried they would be on the receiving end of legal threats anyway, and would rather not find out the hard way whether their work on the Italian Wikipedia were subject to the new legislation.

(1) Everyone has the right to freely express thoughts in speech, writing, and by other communication.
(2) The press may not be controlled by authorization or submitted to censorship.

All-in-all, the Italian politicians behind this proposed legislation emerge with little honor; at the very least, the new law will cast a chill over freedom of expression online in Italy, and at worst could see the Italian Wikipedia shut down permanently – a huge loss for its users and Italian culture.

Update: Via Carl Levinson, Roberta Ranzani and Jillian C. York on Google+, we've learned that the controversial paragraph 29 of the Wiretapping bill has been dropped (details in Italian). It's not clear exactly why, but the action by the Italian Wikipedia must surely have concentrated people's minds. However, it's important to note that the rest of the bill is still going forward - and has plenty of other changes that will harm freedom of speech in Italy if enacted.

from the but-wikipedia-sucks,-right? dept

The Archives says [Dominic] McDevitt-Parks has more than seven years of Wikipedia editing experience. His job will be to foster collaboration between the Wikipedia community and the National Archives. That could include using some of Wikipedia’s tools for ongoing digitization projects at the archives.

It would be interesting to hear the Wikipedia-haters' take on this. It seems to me that this is yet another sign of Wikipedia's place in our current culture.

from the dendrite-me dept

Over the years, we've covered tons of lawsuits about attempts by people to uncover the identity of anonymous critics. Frequently, the aggrieved parties figure out some way to file a defamation lawsuit and use that to uncover the name of the person in question, without much interest in actually going through the rest of the legal proceedings. Judges tend to be a mixed bag on this issue, with many judges recognizing a strong First Amendment free speech value in allowing anonymous speech. In fact, many are (finally) coalescing around the "Dendrite" rules, which outline the conditions under which anonymous online users can or should be identified. The Dendrite hurdle is pretty high, and for a good reason: because anonymity is important.

However, it appears that a magistrate judge in Colorado who admitted he was unaware of the Dendrite case or the associated "rule," decided to just ignore it once being informed of it, and went forward with an order to unmask some anonymous Wikipedia users who the company Faconnable claimed defamed Faconnable. This is worrisome, and thankfully, Public Citizen is pushing back on this, highlighting the importance of protecting anonymity online. Thankfully, another court has put a stay on identifying the guy in question while this issue is hashed out, but it's still unfortunate how many judges are uninformed on issues they're ruling about.

from the good-for-him dept

It's no secret that many in academia do not like Wikipedia. It's regularly frowned upon, and there's often talk about barring the use of Wikipedia. Of course, much of this is based on a misunderstanding of what Wikipedia is and how it works. That's not to say Wikipedia is perfect or trustworthy. But it is a valuable source, when used in conjunction with other sources. And it's nice to see at least some recognizing that. A report on the Wikipedia blog highlights how professor Michel Aaij was able to use his vast Wikipedia contributions as part of his tenure application, and it worked. Obviously, he had done other stuff as well, but the Wikipedia efforts clearly helped (and it didn't hurt that he'd previously turned some of his colleagues around on the whole concept of Wikipedia).

Michel added the articles he’d achieved Good Article status for under the research section, including two that were going through the review process, and added articles that had appeared in the Did You Know section of the main page on medieval and literary topics, as well as topics about Montgomery, Alabama, the town in which his university is located.

"It took a bit of shuffling and organizing, but in the end I had a meaty section on Wikipedia and my work there under research, based on the claim that Did You Knows, Good Articles, and Featured Articles are all scrutinized more or less during a peer-review process," Michel says. "I had supporting materials in the forms of articles I had written in both research and service. In the end, I suggested (based on the advice of three of my colleagues) that Wikipedia articles were no worse than for instance those published by the GALE databases–it is worthwhile adding that we had just hired a new chair partly on the basis of such bibliographic articles."

Michel's tenured colleagues approved him unanimously, and the campus-wide committee awarded him tenure last month, marking perhaps the first time that a professor has received tenure in part due to his Wikipedia contributions.

It certainly would be nice if the overly broad anti-Wikipedia bias in academia was starting to fade... Of course, it's important to point out that it wasn't just Wikipedia edits on his application, but either way, it appears that his colleagues are gaining increasing respect for work done on Wikipedia in addition to traditional journals.

from the it-ain't-so-easy dept

Ross Pruden's recent article highlighted numerous cases where the conventional wisdom, that "the big company always wins" when it goes up against an upstart, is quite frequently wrong. Big companies with lots of money often don't understand the "real" reasons behind successful upstarts and so they end up doing cargo cult copying, where they copy some superficial elements without really understanding the underlying reason for why things succeed.

It looks like we have yet another example of that, with the failure of Google Knol. I have to be honest: I had almost completely forgotten about Knol's existence. When it launched, the press lauded it as a "Wikipedia-killer." Looking back, when it launched I at least expressed some skepticism about the project, noting its similarity to other projects that had failed to gain serious traction. I did give Google the benefit of the doubt in that, if anyone could make such a project work, perhaps it would be Google. However, the fact that it fell off the face of the earth so quickly and is now almost totally abandoned suggests I should have listened to my original skepticism.

Still, it's natural for people to assume that a big company with tons of money entering a space formerly defined by an upstart means that the giant company will come to dominate that space. And it does happen... sometimes. But less frequently than people realize. Google recognized the importance of creating more online knowledge, but didn't quite understand the important community aspects of Wikipedia. In many ways, it's the same issue we recently discussed about Paul Ford's concept of "why wasn't I consulted?" driving successful web community projects. Very little in Knol was about solving the WWIC issue. Instead, it was blank slate knowledge spewing, with little community aspects. In fact, I'd argue that what Quora is doing today is a lot more of what Knol really wanted to be early on but failed. While I'm not as sold on Quora as others have been, there's no denying that it's been growing and getting tremendous usage and has some valuable information. And a large part of that is because it built on that WWIC concept much better than a project like Google Knol.

from the not-much-of-a-community dept

A few months back, we reported that Fidel Castro had apparently become a big fan of the internet, now that he's "retired" and spends a lot of time surfing the web. It wouldn't surprise me if that's part of the reason that Cuba is apparently trying to launch its own sort-of Wikipedia -- but which you can only edit after an "administrator" approves your edits. In other words: don't expect much editing. Of course, we've also noted how it's almost impossible for regular Cuban citizens to access the internet with any speed or regularity, so it would seem that the community of folks who might be most interested in this won't actually be able to use it. In the end, that's what this effort seems to be missing. Wikipedia works because it's a community effort. But Cuba's attempt appears to be more about a top down approach -- which probably isn't surprising, but might make the project much less likely to succeed.

from the a-legal-test dept

PrometheeFeu alerts us to a fascinating situation happening in France. Apparently, a successful French author, Michel Houellebecq, recently came out with a novel, La Carte et Le Territoire. However, it turns out that Houellebecq copied decent chunks of three separate Wikipedia articles in the novel, without any credit or indication that he was quoting another source. This is what is normally referred to as plagiarism -- or, in some views, sampling. This isn't all that surprising, and we hear stories of plagiarism in books all the time. In fact, we tend to think that people get way too upset over such things in books. After being called on it, Houellebecq appears to have admitted to copying those sections.

However, what makes this case more interesting, is what came next. Some folks realized that Wikipedia articles are licensed via a CC-BY-SA license, which in real terms says that you are free to share and remix the work, so long as it's with attribution and (most importantly):

"If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one."

If you're paying attention, you'll realize that it appears Houellebecq's La Carte et Le Territoire appears to "build upon" the Wikipedia works, which would then mean that his work, as well, must also be available under such a license. Thus, they've created a PDF version of the book -- with the proper Wikipedia references added back in -- and put it up for download under the very same CC-BY-SA license.

The question now is whether or not the author or his publisher will take legal action -- and whether or not the reading of the Wikipedia CC-BY-SA license is accurate. It certainly seems like a pretty strong argument can be made in favor of those now sharing the work. The terms of the Wikipedia content are clear, and thus, in using that content, it does appear that Houellebecq and his publisher may be required to abide by the terms of the license. Of course, there are other questions raised by this as well: such as the enforceability of a license that the person might not have read or understood. Before people automatically assume those posting the PDF are in the right here, remember all those stories we've discussed in the past about questionable end user license agreements that people agree to on websites without ever having actually seen them. In those cases, many of us feel that such licenses should not be enforceable. Is the same thing true for a Creative Commons license?

Update: As noted in the comments, the publisher has said it will take legal action against those who posted the work, though it's unclear if such proceedings have started yet.

However, what's odd, is that the judge in the case seems upset about the use of Wikipedia itself, with no specific attempt to determine if the citation was accurate or credible. It appears that the government was really using Wikipedia to call up the infamous psychologists' bible DSM-IV, in order to explore whether or not one of the participants in the case had a real personality disorder. While citing Wikipedia might not be the wisest of decisions, it still seems a bit harsh to dismiss it entirely because of the source, without any effort to determine if the content itself was legitimate.